View our interactive map of the universal bank headlines around the globe in 2013. Our 2012 year in review is here. To view all markers in a city, zoom in to street level. To suggest additional markers for Deutsche Bank headlines in 2013, tweet at us @DBRiskAlert or include #ScandalBank in your tweet. {read more}

Deutsche Bank has said it will need to increase its Ultra High Net Worth clients by 50% by 2015 in order to meet the goal of doubling the unit’s 2011 profit level.[1] However, this will be no small challenge for the bank. Less than a year ago, Co-CEO Anshu Jain spoke plainly to Bloomberg: “If you particularly look at the ultra-high net worth coverage model, the Swiss firms and Goldman Sachs, to name three of our competitors, do a far better job.” Deutsche Bank ranks 8th in the world by AUM of global private banks, according to Scorpio Partnership Private Banking Benchmark 2013. {read more}

SHOULD PRIVATE WEALTH CLIENTS GIVE DEUTSCHE BANK MORE MULLIGANS IN 2013? If you are considering trusting Deutsche Bank and its newly reorganized Asset & Wealth Management division to manage your investments, you should consider the following facts about the bank. In April 2013 a whistleblower exposé of over 2.5 million secret offshore tax haven files identified Deutsche Bank as one of the banks with extensive offshore entities now at risk for scrutiny from tax investigators. The files have been organized into a public searchable database by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). {read more}

In addition to the legal and headline risks, Deutsche Bank has been facing intense criticism from U.S. regulators for capital concerns, culminating in a new rule proposed by the Fed in December 2012 to regulate foreign banks’ U.S. subsidiaries (known as the “Anti-Deutsche Bank Rule” on Wall Street). One of the reasons for the new rule is to prevent another large-scale financial crisis that would force the Federal Reserve to provide billions of dollars in emergency funding to foreign banks operating in the U.S. Recently the head of the FDIC called the bank, “horribly undercapitalized.” {read more}

TTIP talks took place in Brusseks last month, where Eurobanks aim to undermine proposed regulations for foreign banks by the Federal Reserve. We want to know, what is Deutsche Bank– and Germany– doing behind closed doors? What will the EU trade to help get financial services included in TTIP? The new Federal Reserve rule finalized in January 2014 will require Deutsche Bank, like all other too-big-to-fail banks operating in the US, to maintain minimum capital and liquidity as a backstop against taxpayer losses in the event of another financial crisis. But the Association of German Banks has lobbied against this rule and is pushing for a clause in the TTIP that would allow banks like Deutsche Bank to weaken its effect. Why would European negotiators push for a process that would weaken bank solvency rules designed to protect all of us? Conservative economist Simon Johnson wrote a piece on the lack of... {read more}

New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson recently discovered an important connection between Wall Street and payday lending industry by asking a basic yet important question: “When prosecutors pursue payday lenders, why not go further? Investigators should track down — and disclose — the institutions and individuals who make these operations possible by providing the capital that such companies need to conduct their business.” We agree with her approach and we looked more closely into the financing sources behind the payday lending industry. We asked ourselves, why did Deutsche Bank sever its relationship with CashCall Inc. in 2007? For some context, read our blog post on Cash Call and its founder, John Paul Reddam. But back to Morgenson’s initial probe: we actually found a current relationship between Deutsche Bank and a payday lender. We found that since early 2012, Deutsche Bank has been providing funding through a revolving credit facility to DFC... {read more}

In her September 7, 2013 column, Gretchen Morgenson identifies a past relationship between Cash Call, Inc., an online payday lender, and Deutsche Bank, in which the bank led the senior credit facility for Cash Call. When asked by Morgenson why the banks would want to provide backing for companies making high-cost and possibly predatory loans, a spokesperson for Deutsche Bank told her only that the relationship with CashCall ended in 2007. (Read our post on DB’s current funding of payday lender DFC Global here.) We have found that there is more to the Deutsche Bank-Cash Call relationship. It turns out that the founder of Cash Call is a high-net-worth individual who had utilized a failed tax evasion vehicle that Deutsche Bank and KPMG had provided to their clients. Cash Call was founded by J. Paul Reddam, who had founded DiTech, a pioneering subprime mortgage lender, in 1995. When Reddam sold DiTech... {read more}

Washington, D.C. – On the eve of the Deutsche Bank Championship, a PGA Tour Playoff event held at TPC Boston in Norton, Mass., UNITE HERE calls for tournament officials to ensure that foreign players play by the same rules and are held to the same standards as U.S. players. “We all believe in fair play and a level playing field,” said UNITE HERE spokesperson Marty Leary. “Therefore, foreign players should be required to compete at the Deutsche Bank Championship under the same rules as American players. For example, foreign golfers should be given no more mulligans than American golfers. In fact, no player should be handed any mulligans and get bailed out from their own bad decisions and poor play.” {read more}